Project Icarus Becomes Bioshock Infinite

Just in case you didn't know, Ken Levine and Irrational Games dropped a megaton yesterday. At the announcement presser for Irrational's Project Icarus, Levine outed the title as none other than Bioshock Infinite. Think Bioshock, but in a fantastical flying citadel with clockwork robots, new plasmids and loads of roses. I'll let the trailer fill you in.

Apparently, Irrational Games felt that they'd milked Rapture's underwater setting as far as they could without becoming complacent, and had decided to ignore Bioshock 2 in favour of an entirely new setting. Basically, they like a challenge.

“But we felt we had said what we wanted to say about Rapture, about those kind of environments and that kind of feel. We want to scare the hell out of people, we want to shock people, but we didn’t want to have any of the tools, the crutches, that we knew how to do that with." -Ken Levine to Eurogamer

I'd go into more detail, but Felix will be delivering a full preview tomorrow. Stay tuned!

id Demonstrates Rage... on the iPhone?!

Yesterday we informed you that id Software were gearing up for a "neat" annoucement- and I'm more than willing to admit that I didn't see this one coming. At all. Apparently id founder/Technical Director John Carmack has found a little downtime between overseeing Rage and Doom 4 development, and decided to try out compressing textures to fit id games onto the Wii. This project subsquently ballooned out of all proportion... resulting in the ability to fit Rage onto the iPhone 4 at 60FPS.

Carmack showed off the technology during Quakecon's keynote speech- and bar some control issues, it's an incredible achievement. After all, the graphical quality apparently "kills" anything on the PS2 or original Xbox! Why not check out the demo below (which doesn't do it justice).

God bless you, Carmack. Some developers posture, shout and don't deliver... but id clams up, works hard and makes it happen. Even if "it" happens to be a surprisingly capable accidental side project that no-one was expecting. [1UP]

Realtime Worlds On The Ropes?

We've been hearing some ominous rumblings from sources close to Scottish studio Realtime Worlds, the developers behind the original Crackdown, APB and the upcoming Project MyWorld . Games Industry reports that numerous publishers have turned down the opportunity to get behind MyWorld due to its untested concept- and have had to sack 60 team members in their latest employee restructuring effort.

VG247 has also issued a seperate report claiming that the entire MyWorld team has been laid off... which also suggests that 60 staff have been made redundant.

We've also heard rumours that Realtime Worlds plan to sell APB in order to claw back some capital.

These are all rumours at this stage- but trust me, something is rotten in the state of Realtime Worlds. Don't expect to see any more MyWorld announcements for the time being.

UPDATE: RW has confirmed the redundancies but have stated that they'll be retaining APB for the time being.

Sniper: Ghost Warrior Gets Free Gamechanging Patch

By all rights, sniper games should be awesome... but by screwing up some of the basics, Sniper: Ghost Warrior didn't manage to live up to its potential. We expected City Interactive to leave it at that- but luckily, they've tinkered about with some of the more annoying problems and released a free title update that will correct some of the rampant annoyances of the Xbox 360 version.

These improvements include a raft of tweaks to the AI routine and stealth system, resulting in a better (i.e. lessbroken) sniping experience. I'll be sure to amend the review if they make a substantial difference to the gameplay. [BattleStrats]

Just how is that possible on the iPhone?! HOW?!!! I know it's a high spec for a handheld device but it's still not exactly cutting edge graphic technology with dedicated GPUs etc etc. I'm sure that many PCs with slightly ageing GFX cards would struggle to run Rage... And he even says that it will run on a iPhone 2G, well that's 4 years old now!

Either iD have developed some sort of genius algorithms that mean that to display graphics like that requires a fraction of the compute power than before (in which case, say goodbye to nvidia and AMD share prices) or there's some sort of witchcraft going on.

When id software are involved, it's literally half skill and half powerful dark magic. I'm not saying that Carmack sold his soul to dark forces at the crossroads to gain his mastery of coding... but on the other hand, that would explain a few things.

New "megatexturing" and compression algorithms may also have a little something to do with it.